Welcome to the second edition of Chuck’s Musings, today I discuss Star Trek games and the game industry, the lengths one fan film is going to, to keep their hobbies alive and the lengths of TV shows.

Star Trek Games

We got spoiled in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, we had games like Judgement Rites, Starfleet Academy, Armada I and II, Elite Force I and II, Starfleet Command and its sequels and Bridge Commander.

Then game quality started to drop maybe it coincided with the lack of Star Trek on our screens between 2005 and 2017 though people still love Star Trek Online even with the giant furniture and big rooms.

Resurgence appears to be a return to form but then Star Trek: Infinite came out and while reviews were positive early on Steam, they are now mixed reviews, it appears they rushed the game out of the gate and are now paying the price.

Game companies are not giving developers time to make solid games anymore, they have to be rushed released, people snap them up on release and they find out the game is a bug filled mess, but the companies don’t care, they got your money and now it is up to the developers to fix the mess their bosses insisted on making but once that money grabbing slows down, the game bug fixes slides down the order of importance.

Any Port in a Storm?

Axanar needed money to finish their two fifteen-minute fan film parts, they got it and not by Crowdfunding but by benefactors and those benefactors belong to the group in the video above.

Check out the ‘Modern Mystery School‘ and check out all the prices people pay, How on Earth do people know if their DNA has been ‘unlocked’? Does a machine tell you or a person? How can you prove somebody is a descendent of Thor? If all the stuff about unlocking DNA etc. is true, why only give it to the people who have paid (or borrowed) a lot of money? why not give it freely for benefit all of humanity?

The crazy part of it is that nobody close to Axanar has any objections to these people or they are keeping their mouths shut and fingers away from keyboards if they do, nobody cares to take a stand as long as the money is flowing, and the cameras are rolling, a hobby at any price.

What will we see next? A fan film group going to Neo-Nazis to fund their next fan film? It is scary to think that questionable groups like this school or individuals are acceptable without question for fan film makers, I really hope the others never go down this path.

Season Lengths

The lengths of TV shows are so disappointing these days, we used to get 22 or so episodes a season of a show and now most of them just go for 8 to 12 episodes.

The downside to bigger seasons is that there is a chance of story quality dipping which was obvious as there were filler episodes, even The Simpsons made fun of clip shows by having a clip show or two.

The downside to smaller seasons is a lack of standalone episodes so if you want to watch an episode of Discovery or Picard, you pretty much have to watch from the start of the season unlike Star Trek or TNG where you could just put almost any episode on without missing something, another downside is the long wait for another season to come, due to smaller seasons, you’re waiting longer for shows.

I don’t envy TV decision makers; they know they’ll get hammered if they go the cookie cutter route over and over again but if they go too different, they’ll fall into the same hole that they tried to avoid by not doing a repeat of the past.

We’ve also lost some seven minutes of episode time over the last couple of decades, shows are getting smaller on TV and the ads are getting longer though streamers do have the advantage of airing full length episodes like ‘For All Mankind’ gets around the hour mark which is good.

Conclusion

That wraps up another edition of Chuck’s Musings, as you can see there was quite a lot to think about and write about, that’s how it is going to be every Sunday on MTM.